Sundar Pichai's Quora account hacked

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GizBot Bureau

Written By: GizBot Bureau

Published: Monday, June 27, 2016, 16:52 [IST]

The same team that earlier broke into Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter and Pinterest accounts has now hacked into Google CEO Sundar Pichai's account on the question-answer website Quora, media reports said on Monday.

After breaching his account late on Sunday, the group called OurMine had posted messages on Quora through Pichai's account.

It is also connected to his Twitter account and as a result, OurMine was able to publicise their hack to all 508,000 of his followers, technology website The Next Web reported. OurMine appears to be in a hacking spree of top tech bosses this month.

After taking credit for Zuckerberg's social media accounts, it also compromised the Twitter account of the microblogging site's co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams earlier this month. Spotify's Daniel Ek was one of its targets too.

It is not clear how the group is gaining access to their accounts, but it likely does not involve system breaches of the social networks their targets have accounts with.

Instead, the group claims that it uses various exploits to pull passwords from celebrities' browsers, the report said. The hacking of Pichai's Quora account warrants the users of the question-answer website to change their passwords.

Recently, popular career-oriented platform LinkedIn notified about data breach and alerted its 400 million members to stay safe.

Hit by a massive data breach that put nearly 167 million users' passwords and personal information in the hands of hackers four years back, LinkedIn came out with an explanation and steps it has taken to protect users.

In an email sent out to all its members, LinkedIn admitted that the massive data breach in 2012 may result in millions of passwords being leaked to the internet.